When living in New York City, $1.50 takes on a singular meaning: less than a one-stop train ride, less than a daily newspaper, often times less than a bottle of water. When I lived in Guatemala, $1.50 was much different. When earning $200 a month, it meant that these $1.50s added up quite noticeably to the $6 I could spend each day. It therefore meant that each $1.50 was intentional, with no room to err under a fleeting impulse. Though I lived in Central America for only a few years, I have carried this formative experience with me into my work with The Hunger Project. When encouraged to participate in Live Below the Line as a staff member in our New York office, I was ecstatic to be able to challenge myself again, and raise awareness for what $1.50 means for 1.2 billion people.
Living in New York City seems easy for those effortless few seen breezing down a SoHo sidewalk, sunhat and sunglasses, sipping a latte and dodging cracks in the sidewalk. Struggling to immerse oneself into this graceful environment can misalign priorities, and Live Below the Line awoke me to how disconnectedly I was living my daily life: I was forgetting what poverty actually means as I tried to build my new life in the city. The eagerness of my colleagues at The Hunger Project to engage with Live Below the Line provided a perfect community with which to share this challenge, and Global Poverty Project the perfect support.
In my Live Below the Line participation, there was no question that my support would go to The Hunger Project. As a global nonprofit that works to empower women and men in Africa, South Asia and Latin America to end their own hunger, it is the perfect organization to lead the discussion on ending poverty. By mobilizing people at the grassroots level to build self-reliance, The Hunger Project puts people in the 15,000 villages where we work at the heart of our programming, empowering them to create their own vision and lead their own change. Their actions will inspire me each day as I am participating in this challenge.
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Written by Bridget Barry